On Aug 17, 2010, at 4:04 AM, Magnus Berg wrote: > Hi Marsha > > On 2010-08-17 09:07, MarshaV wrote: >> Yes, I am quite sure my understanding developed from Buddhist texts. > > I'm sure, but that wasn't my question. I asked: > > are you sure you > would have come to the same conclusion had you not known about Bo's > version beforehand? > >> Buddhism is all about self and objects. But I had a head start by >> studying Hatha Yoga, Vedic texts and meditating in the 80's. Where >> does what you know come from? > > I know hardly anything about Buddhism, especially not first-hand. But I > thought its aim was to merge the self with reality, not to divide the self > from objects? That's why I questioned why even SOM was a problem in Buddhism, > I thought it simply didn't exist. > > Magnus
That would be one way of stating it, but I read gazillions on the _illusion_ that self and objects (explicitly mentioned) are taken to be independent, permanent entities. Take for instance: "The ways in which the relationship between mind and world have been considered for the last few hundred years in Western thought and science are being radically reconceived and ideas from a wide variety of sources are now being taken more seriously than ever. Philosophical perspectives from the Buddhist traditions of India are of particular interest because they have long addressed issues that are currently in contention: if we are not Cartesian subjects essentially alienated from our bodies and the material world, as many have previously accepted, then who and what are we? And what then is the status of the “world” we purportedly stood against? Or our perceptions of it? Or the consequences of actions within it? And if the line between self and world is not nearly as clear or hard and fast as we have assumed, where or what is it? We propose to address such questions by considering a wide range of ideas from Indian Buddhist traditions and various scientific fields. We shall find thinkers in both areas who have reached surprisingly similar conclusions on a number of key issues: they similarly conclude that (1) the “self” is a designation for interactive processes rather than the name of an autonomous entity, and (2) that cognitive awareness only arises as a result of interaction between subject and object,whicharethemselves,however,(3)ultimatelyinseparable.1 Theseconclusionsleadthem to the counter-intuitive idea that (4) such awareness occurs neither solely inside nor wholly outside of the brain, but only at the interface of “self” and world. We are further surprised when we find thinkers in both these areas who therefore (5) understand the “world” as necessarily correlative with specific organisms or species, and then (6) go on to suggest similar causal patterns—i.e. circular causality—whereby these “worlds” and species-specific awareness of them concomitantly come about (i.e. they co-evolve), (7) disclosing, for our human “world,” the indispensable influences of language and society. And, finally, we are astonished to discover that some Buddhists and scientists agree that our sense of self, object, world, and society, (8) not only occurs mostly automatically and unconsciously, but also necessarily (9) includes the whole network of language users, past and present, leading them, at last, to (10) concur with the epigraph above that, at least for man, mind “hath no place to lay its head.” That these views are even comparable only becomes clear when they are seen in light of one another. That is, the startling implications of various scientific understandings of perception, world and mind, could easily be overlooked if they were examined one by one, without the perspective that a well-developed and integrated world view such as Indian Buddhism provides. Conversely, the relevance, and oft-times even the import, of basic Buddhist ideas could be occluded without the fresh perspectives that scientific inquiries into the arising of awareness provide. We will pursue this mutual edification of Buddhist and scientific understandings of mind and world by pursuing a single line of inquiry to its logical, if vertiginous, conclusion: the idea that awareness arises in dependence upon an ultimately indefinite range of causes and conditions and is therefore a function neither of the subject by itself nor of the world alone. In this light, we shall see that our selves, our worlds, and our minds can be understood more fully and more deeply if we consider them not as autonomous entities originally existing apart from each other and only subsequently coming together, but rather as aspects of recurrent patterns of interactions that concurrently arise. The objects of such analyses, in other words, are not really objects at all, but specific, recurrent relationships. This perspective is most succinctly stated in the classical Buddhist formula of dependent arising (pañicca-samuppāda): When this is, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this is not, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases. (M II 32, etc.). This shift in focus—reframing questions from “who did what to whom?” to “how do interactive processes come to occur?”—replaces the implicit metaphysics of autonomous agents acting upon independent objects with a view of the complex and patterned arising of phenomena. This alone largely explains one of the most overlooked similarities between scientific and Buddhist modes of inquiry: that in their common attempt to understand not the essence but the arising of things, they have both found it necessary to dispense with the notions of substantive entities, unchanging essences or independent agents altogether. This is a momentous shift entailing ever-widening implications. We shall gradually draw out these implications by examining three aspects of interdependence: between self and object, self and world, and self and society." 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